Nine services became four

Animated presentations. Documents and design. Content. Sales enablement. IT problem-solving. Alongside the four I actually want to be hired for.

I cut five of them.

The about page says the angle is deliberately narrow. Then the services page listed nine specialisms, and items seven through nine were the ones a generalist lists when they are not certain what they sell.

Read in order, the way someone deciding whether to hire you reads it, the site made its own argument and then undermined it three items before the list ran out.

Individually every item was true. I have done all nine and done them properly. Collectively they made a worse case than four of them do, and the difference is not about honesty — it is that a claim to range and a claim to depth cannot both be the headline.

The four that stayed are the ones I want to be judged on: credibility rebuilds, custom software, working with UK firms remotely, and the handover walkthrough at the end of a build.

The structured data went with them. The machine-readable offer list on those pages said nine too, and a machine reading nine generalist offers draws the same conclusion a person does. If you cut a claim from the copy and leave it in the markup, you have not cut it — you have just stopped looking at it.

My first instinct was to keep all nine and reorder them, on the theory that nothing is lost by offering more.

That theory is wrong for one person specifically. A firm with thirty people can credibly list thirty capabilities, because the reader assumes different people do them. One person listing nine is not describing capacity. They are describing uncertainty, and the reader prices it accordingly.

Nothing was added in the edit. The page got shorter and said more.